Patient

Definition

In linguistics, a patient refers to the entity that undergoes an action or is affected by an event within a sentence. This role is crucial in understanding how meaning is constructed in relation to the actions performed by agents and the involvement of other participants.

5 Must Know Facts For Your Next Test

1. The patient role is primarily concerned with the recipient of the action and can often be identified by asking 'what' or 'who' is affected by the verb in a sentence.
2. Patients are commonly found in sentences with transitive verbs, where there is a clear action performed on them by an agent.
3. In some cases, patients can also take on different grammatical forms, such as subjects, direct objects, or oblique arguments depending on sentence structure.
4. The identification of patients is essential for understanding various semantic relations, as it helps to clarify who or what experiences the consequences of actions.
5. Different languages may express the patient role in diverse ways, sometimes through inflection or word order, influencing how relationships between participants are conveyed.

Review Questions

• How does identifying the patient in a sentence help clarify the overall meaning of the action being described?
  • Identifying the patient helps clarify the overall meaning by specifying who or what is affected by the action. This relationship between the agent performing the action and the patient receiving it enhances comprehension of event dynamics. For example, in 'The cat chased the mouse,' recognizing 'the mouse' as the patient reveals its role as the entity impacted by the cat's action.
• Discuss how different languages might express the patient role and what implications this has for cross-linguistic studies.
  • Different languages may express the patient role through various syntactic structures or morphological markers. For instance, some languages may use case markings to indicate patients, while others may rely on fixed word order. This variation has significant implications for cross-linguistic studies, as it challenges researchers to consider how meaning is constructed and understood differently across cultures, highlighting universal themes in semantic roles.
• Evaluate how understanding the concept of a patient can influence our comprehension of complex sentence structures involving multiple participants.
  • Understanding the concept of a patient allows us to analyze complex sentence structures involving multiple participants more effectively. It enables us to discern relationships among agents, patients, and other roles such as experiencers or beneficiaries. For example, in a sentence like 'The teacher gave a book to the student,' recognizing both 'the book' as the patient and 'the student' as a beneficiary enriches our understanding of how different entities interact within a narrative. This awareness also aids in deciphering ambiguity when multiple roles are present.

Related terms

Agent: The agent is the entity that performs an action or causes an event to happen in a sentence.

Theme: A theme is often used interchangeably with patient, referring to the entity that is being affected or changed by the action.

Experiencer: An experiencer is an entity that perceives or feels an experience, often affected by an action but not necessarily in a physical sense.